The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of cognitive skills in promoting economic well-being, with a particular...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestantregions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Biblegenerated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. We test the theory using...

We try to identify which economic factors might be responsible for the large international differences in student performance. We present time series evidence for a number of European countries which suggests that rising educational expenditures obviously did not improve student performance....

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly associated with math, science and reading achievement. Our models...

We use estimates of the effect of educational achievement-measured by international student achievement tests-on economic growth to simulate the impact of improved achievement for individual EU countries and the EU as a whole. We calculate the present value of improvements in GDP over the life...

We estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 11 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Conventional estimates of class-size effects are shown to be...

This paper develops empirical growth models suitable for dual economies, and studies the relationship between structural change and economic growth. Changes in the structure of employment will raise aggregate productivity when the marginal product of labor varies across sectors. The models in...

Teachers differ greatly in how much they teach their students, but little is known about which teacher attributes account for this. We estimate the causal effect of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement using within-teacher within-student variation, exploiting a unique Peruvian...